


Comparative Anatomy

by universal_reno



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Kraglin is confused, Pre-Movie(s), Ravagers - Freeform, marsupial pirates, pouch!Yondu, theiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 08:00:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11436579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/universal_reno/pseuds/universal_reno
Summary: “So all Centaurian men’s built to be pirates, is what yer sayin?”Kraglin discovers something new about his Captain.





	Comparative Anatomy

**Author's Note:**

> For all my shipmates over at the 99th Ravager Clan. Y'all are the best!
> 
> Another thing that took me way too long to get around to finishing. In my mind it's set not long after the ending I've got planned out for Remember When We Were Young (which I promise I totally haven't abandoned, by the way), but that's not terribly relevant except to explain why Kraglin is still kinda young and kinda stupid and only half Xandarian. Yondu's rockstar/pornstar outfit is from the comics, Yondu's pouch is from Write_like_an_American, and darling Kraggles' confusion is all mine.

After almost two decades of life on the seedier side of the galaxy Kraglin could hardly be called innocent. He’d seen things and done things and been done by things that neither Spartoi nor Xandarian biology were intended to endure, and had generally enjoyed every minute of it. This though? This was a whole other level of strange. 

He and Yondu had just finished up a job on Chandilar. It was the sort of simple snatch and grab operation that Yondu had been training rookies for since he’d first taken up with Stakar the best part of a decade before. Hardly the kind of work befitting the dignity of a newly minted Ravager captain and his fist mate, but forming a crew required units and the artifact they’d nabbed from the Shi'ar Palace of Culture was worth a bundle. 

The sheer value of the thing probably explained why such an easy job had nearly gone tits up. One minute Kraglin had been standing guard in the sewers that ran under the vault waiting for Yondu to finish slicing through the floor with a plasma torch. The next thing he knew both of them were running for their lives from a hoard of heavily armed sentry bots.

Once they’d reached their m-ship Yondu had ordered him to take off before the hatch was even fully closed. Kraglin had obeyed with more than usual enthusiasm, leading the tailing squadron of Shi'ar Imperial Guards on a frantic sprint to the nearest jump while Yondu manned the guns grinning like a madman the whole time. It was the sort of thing ambitious young Ravagers lived for: adventure, ready cash, and a high likelihood of sudden and violent death. 

It wasn’t until they were safely through the jump (and a couple of others for good measure) that Kraglin remembered about the artifact. He glanced over at Yondu and had to bite his tongue to hold back the instinctive sarcastic remark when he realized the damn thing was nowhere to be seen. 

It wasn’t like Yondu had many good hiding places, either. Since becoming captain he’d adopted a distinctive and, in Kraglin’s opinion, ridiculous style of dress that left little space for stashing loot. The leather trenchcoat was fairly standard Ravager kit, even if the fur trim was a bit much. But he insisted on wearing it with no shirt and a pair of tight leather trousers that would’ve been more fitting for a Xandarian pop star than a mercenary captain. Presumably Yondu thought it made him look intimidating. Or maybe he just appreciated the way half the sexually compatible beings in every space port they visited couldn’t take their eyes off him. 

Now it was Kraglin’s turn to rake his eyes over his captain’s body, albeit for more professional reasons.

“Please tell me ya got the…”

Yondu rolled his eyes and smirked. “Course I got it. They’dve hardly been chasin us otherwise.”

Kraglin continued to stare expectantly for a long and increasingly awkward moment.

“Do I even wanna know where you’ve stashed it?” he finally asked.

He immediately wished he hadn’t. Yondu reached down to run his hand over what Kraglin had always assumed was a nasty battle scar several inches above his belt. Then his hand disappeared into what, to the untrained observer at least, appeared to be his own guts.

Kraglin could practically feel the color draining from his face. He’d seen some pretty weird shit in his life. An A'askvarii girl had nearly enveloped him whole one time, and had chased him with a knife she kept hidden somewhere in the gelatinous mass of her person when he’d tried to flee. But as far as he knew Centaurians didn’t work like that.

So it was an immense relief when Yondu withdrew his hand a moment later to reveal the gilt icon of the first Shi'ar Majestrix, encrusted with the requisite array of jewels and other assorted valuables but mercifully devoid of blood or slime or anything else revoltingly biological.

“Catchin flies, Obfonteri?” 

Kraglin snapped his mouth closed with an audible click of sharpened platinum teeth and rearranged his expression into something he hoped was less askance before Yondu got irritated enough to move from sarcasm to whistling. 

“No, sir. It’s just… What the hell species did you say you was, again?” His sense of self preservation was barely sufficient to override the urge to stare, or better yet poke at, this newly discovered quirk of his captain’s anatomy. But he knew from painful experience that Yondu reacted badly to even casual touching let alone outright prodding.

“Centaurian. How many times we gotta go over this?”

“That’s what I though. It’s just the…” Kraglin gestured vaguely to his own stomach “I mean…What? Where’d you even…?”

He looked so utterly confused that Yondu couldn’t help but laugh. He pulled a spare blaster charge clip, a biolock hacking tool, and a pointless but shiny bauble he’d swiped off some stall on Knowhere out of his pouch purely to see how his first mate would react. With each item Kraglin looked even more baffled.

“Centaurians is marsupials, boy.” He explained once he’d managed to regain his composure somewhat. 

“Mara-whatsits?”

“Means we got pouches. For babies. At least the women do. Men’ve got pouches for theivin’. It’s like how you got nipples even though you can’t use ‘em for nothin.”

“Right…” Kraglin drawled, as though saying the word slow enough might help the concept sink in better. He failed to see the connection between nipples and thieving, except that he’d stolen the gold ring he wore through one of his own. “So all Centaurian men’s built to be pirates, is what yer sayin?”

Yondu shrugged noncommittally. He’d been sold to the Kree with a handful of other children from his home world, but none of the others had made it more than a couple of months and he hadn’t seen another Centaurian since. Honestly he didn’t know what the other members of his species did with their pouches, but he was pretty sure his idea was the best. 

“‘Spose ya could say that.”

That was good enough for Kraglin. He’d always figured Yondu was born for the Ravager lifestyle, and he took this as validation of that view.

“Should see if we can get some more of y’all for the crew, maybe.”

Yondu was a little too quick to shake his head in response, but if Kraglin noticed he was smart enough not to mention it. His last concrete memory of his own species was watching his father walking away with a credit chip right before a Kree soldier threw a bag over his head and dragged him off to twenty years of living hell. Frankly that was all he needed or wanted to know about Centaurians.

Attempting to look casual he leaned back in his seat and held the pilfered icon up to admire the way the largest gems shattered the starlight into a million tiny sparks. Then he tucked it back into his pouch for safekeeping until they could get to the Broker. 

“Nah, Centaurians is kinda assholes. I mean, lookit me.”

Kraglin made a noise that was neither affirmation nor denial and turned his attention back to plotting their course to the rendezvous point with the _Eclector_. Seemed like there were more than a few things he didn’t know about his new captain, but he intended on sticking around long enough to find them all out.


End file.
